A metaphor for the movies?

Rating: 1/10 (30 July 2004)

It's possible that 'cinema' (or "the movies") could be one of Tornatore's thematic preoccupations. Given that the director of CINEMA PARADISO made THE LEGEND OF 1900 at the time when cinema was celebrating its first 100 years, it is possible to read the film as a reflection on the state of cinema as it enters its second centenary.
One can't say for certain. For the most part the film concentrates on telling its story. However, the scent of metaphor hangs in the air. Just below the surface lies a resigned nostalgia hinting that the "greatness" of cinema may be a thing of the past. Like a big old rusting passenger ship consumed by an indifferent ocean, the brilliance and splendour of cinema has sunk to the bottom of a sea of mediocrity. THE LEGEND OF 1900 suggests that cinema has been reduced to churning out repetitious and facile dead-in-the-water crowd-pleasers, one lumbering TITANIC after another, and it does so by being exactly that.
There is a pivotal scene near the end of the film where Max (Pruitt Taylor Vince) talks to the character known as '1900' (Tim Roth) within the rusted bowels of the abandoned ship (the worn-out wreckage of cinema). 1900 has never been on dry land. The ship is the only reality he has ever known, and he refuses to leave. As it creaks and groans beneath them, Max tries to convince him by describing the world beyond the vessel as a place of infinite choice, but he knows that 1900 will never accept the mediocrity of dry land (modern-day commercial movies). There is no place in such a world for the true artist. 1900 will go down with the ship (the discarded notion of cinematic art) rather than compromise his true nature.
So, did Tornatore intend THE LEGEND OF 1900 as a denunciation of big-budget commercial Euro-puddings, cleverly making the film in the vacuous style of its worst excesses (i.e. criticising the likes of TITANIC by emulating them), or did he simply make a vacuous film? I suspect the latter. As one of the characters says, 'You're never really done-for as long as you have a good story, and someone to tell it to'. Maybe he meant to say, 'someone to SELL it to'.